Bayer to partner on drought-tolerant cotton

Bayer CropScience AG and Performance Plants Inc. (Kingston, Canada) have entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for the development and commercialization of drought-tolerant cotton using Performance Plants’ Yield Protection Technology (YPT).

The agreement follows several years of successful field trials by Performance Plants, which have shown YPT to be highly effective in preserving yields under conditions of drought stress. In five years of field trials, YPT canola has produced consistent seed yield increases of up to 26 percent.

Linda Trolinder, Global Cotton R&D Manager at BioScience, a business operations unit of Bayer CropScience, welcomes this business relationship with Performance Plants. “At Bayer CropScience, we strive to be the global innovation leader in cotton and continually seek to deliver valuable new solutions for farmers through our high quality, high-yielding FiberMax, Stoneville and Surpass cottonseed varieties. We anticipate that Perfomance Plants’ innovative YPT will contribute to further strengthening our leadership position in the global cotton market, especially with regard to ensuring higher yields in difficult climatic conditions.”

“Our results and those of other partners we work with continue to show the yield-protecting benefits of our drought-tolerance technology. We are pleased that Bayer CropScience will now extend these results to cotton, a crop whose yield is frequently limited by insufficient rainfall. This agreement is further validation of the commercial potential of our traits,” said Peter Matthewman, president and Chief Executive Officer of Performance Plants.